Pillar next to the former site of the Gas
House. In the background: The Fall of Icarus mural by John
Wehrle

Venice Poets

This is by no means a comprehensive study of Venice poets
or poets associated with Venice - there are thousands. No poet should
feel insulted because he or she is not noted here, or not covered with
completeness. This section is a work in progress, and it had to start
somewhere!

Choosing a poet's underlined name from the alphabetical
list below will either take you to a different area of the page for more
infomation, or in some cases to another page on this website.

Poets Respond to the War
This event took place on November 24, 2002 at Beyond Baroque, in reaction
to the imminent war on Iraq. Participating poets included Wanda Coleman,
Austin Straus, James Ragan, Henry Morro, John Harris, Linda Albertano,
Jerry Quickley, Lewis McAdams, Michael Datcher, Jenoyne Adams, Dimi Hilal
and Sami Shalom Chetrit.

Venice West Cafe
Founded by Stuart Perkoff, later taken over by John and Anna Haag, was
on Dudley Avenue.

Sign in the window in a 1964 photo:

NO MORE POETRY! No poetry readings here
until further notice due to action by the art-hating anti-intellectual
yahoos of the L. A. Police Dept. This case will go to the Supreme Court
if necessary. POETS, ARISE! Defend the Oral Tradition

Poetry is what Venice is all about. It
aint the only thing, but its the fundamental thing.........................old
Venice saying

Linda Albertano
day job: manager of building where Jim Morrison used to live

Robert Alexander
also artist and printer, and heroin addict for a time. Later established
the Temple of Man in 1966

Agha Shahid Ali
Kashmiri poet, not local but the subject of a Venice incident reported
by Christopher Merrill: He signed bookshis
own and otherswith lavish inscriptions. At lunch in Venice, California,
for example, he presented me with a book .. On the title page, inspired
by the sight of all the sleek women in bikinis rollerblading by, he wrote:
"we again learn, on the boardwalk, that some hieroglyphs of desire
move on wheels."

Terry Blackhawk
Her poem "On the Mockingbird Singing in the Morning in the Barrio
a Few Blocks from the Boardwalk on the Beach in Venice, California"
was a runner-up in the 1997 Marlboro Prize poetry competition. Blackhawk
went on to found and direct a writers-in-schools program called InsideOut,
in Detroit.

Millicent Borges
many years in Venice, relocated to Topanga

Marcielle Brandler
Also a singer and songwriter. Her poems have been translated into Czech,
French, Arabic, and Spanish, and have been published in several countries.
Has taught English, Literature, Creative Writing, and Critical Thinking
at the college level for two decades. Hosted a monthly poetry reading
series called "Ambassadors of Delight" for three years; hosts
Time Warner Public Access TV show called Marcielle Presents!

Susie Bright
I don't know if Susie Bright writes poetry, but in reviewing a record
album she remarked that when she was 14 her father used to take her on
Wednesday evenings to a poetry group that met in a shabby room in Venice.
People passed around quarts of malt liquor and read their latest work,
including a woman with the messiest hair I had ever seen, named Exene
Cervenka.

Luis Campos joined the original Venice Poetry Workshop in 1969.

Neeli Cherkovski
hung out with Venice Beats & Bukowski.

Jeanette Clough
co-facilitator of Hyperpoets reading series at Rose Cafe

Robert Duncan wrote "The Venice Poem" and gave at least one reading at
On The Beach Bookstore. Don't know if he ever lived in Venice

Jenny Factor
teacher of poetry at Beyond Baroque

Charlie Foster
Beat scene, early 60s. Foster came from money, went to grad school, served
in the Army air corps, was an alcoholic, wrote ad copy, and according
to the detailed employment log given by John Arthur Maynard, Foster may
have held more different kinds of jobs than any living person. A junkie
who hung out with Alexander Trocchi, Foster wrote "The Troubled Makers"
which was published in Evergreen Review. Maynard says, "Of
all the Venice Beats, only Charlie Foster started out with any substantial
advantages in life, and he spent his whole life making sure they would
do him no good."

francEye
also known as the bearded witch of Ocean Park and the female Charles Bukowski

Steve Goldman
founder/MC of The Venice Poetry Readings in The New Library, successor/continuation
of The Venice Poetry Readings in the Old Jail, after a short 20-year hiatus.

Jack Hirschman lived in Venice from 1967-71. His first major book of poetry was
A Correspondence of Americans. He taught at UCLA and, along with
other anti-Vietnam war activities, gave A marks to students eligible for
the draft. This got him fired. He studied Kaballah, and as a homelessness
activist, was arrested several times. In January of 2006, named Poet Laureate
of San Francisco.

Bob Kaufman
The only black Beat poet with a Jewish name, Kaufman was born in New Orleans
to a black mother and white father. He was also known as "The Black
American Rimbaud" and "The Original Be-Bop Man."

David Meltzer said of him, Bob
Kaufman was overtly political, invariably confronting the two policemen
on the beat and antagonizing them to the point where theyd beat
the shit out of him and take him to jail. Then hed come back and
do it again.

I first heard of Kaufman through being in a screenwriting
seminar, at Beyond Baroque, with his wife Eileen. She was writing a screenplay
about Kaufman's life and their son was going to play the lead. I'm pretty
sure she told me he was dead, and that was in early 1978. In October of
'81, I read a review by Kate Braverman of The Ancient Rain, a collection
of Kaufman's poems, and she spoke of him in the past tense.

So imagine my surprise on reading in January of 1986
that Bob Kaufman had just died from emphysema at age 60. The explanation
of the mystery: apparently he was in the habit of withdrawing from life
to such an extent that he might as well have been dead. It is said that
Kaufman gave up talking in 1963 and didn't speak again until 1975 when
the Vietnam war ended. Andrei Codrescu says, Kaufman
did, eventually, talk again and astonished everyone with long poems composed
in his mind during the long years of silence.

Then in 1978 Bob Kaufman said, I
want to be anonymous - my ambition is to be completely forgotten,
and stopped talking again. It may be that he convinced his wife and everyone
else to refer to him as no longer living.

John Kenevan
Korean war veteran, painter, poet, who ran the Venice West Café
after Perkoff gave it up

Fritz Leiber
Mainly known as a science fiction writer and as an actor, upon his death
Leiber left to the University of Houston more than 60 boxes of his literary
effects. Box #38 (one of the 15 boxes of Leiber's own writings) contains
an item called "Poetry 1959 - The Beach at Santa Monica from Venice
to Malibu."

Lawrence LiptonBruno in Venice West and Other Poems was published in 1976 by Venice
West Publishers, which happened to be in Van Nuys. The works were selected
and arranged by Lipton before his death in 1974. The title poem is dedicated
to Giordano Bruno, who was burned by the Inquisition in 1600. This
Venice of the West was born a bastard...when business and the arts are
mated, money takes the Muse to bed.

Lipton was accused by the Beats of aggrandizing himself
and attracting tourists, who rubbernecked their way through Venice just
as they would years later through the Haight-Ashbury hippie district of
San Francisco. But if nothing else, Lipton was in the right time and right
place to save the notebooks of Stuart Perkoff, who was in police custody,
when family members cleaned out his house. That alone is sufficient to
assure immortality.

I've seen an autographed first edition of Lipton's book
The Holy Barbarians offered for sale at around $300. He signed
it in 1959 with the inscription, Come to Venice West
and make the scene.

John Arthur Maynard wrote of him, "Like most who
speak for movements, Lipton had a habit of exaggerating the size of his
army .he tended to give the impression that Venice West was full
of beatniks, even though he was only talking about two or three dozen
people " (On the other hand, you-know-Who started out
with only one dozen.) According to Maynard, Perkoff maintained that Liptons
book should have been called Holy Horseshit.

His poem "Julie" contains the lines, ....so
she went away to live in Venice wearing no makeup......but someone should
have told poor Julie the Beats have all gone home......

Edwin Markham
Not local, but famous, in 1914 or perhaps 1916 he was scheduled to recite
at the auditorium of the Venice Grammar School (Westminster) with rave
advance publicity. Markham was known for his short poem, "Outwitted."

He drew a circle that shut me out -
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout;
But love and I had the with to win;
We drew a circle that took him in.

Taylor Mead Has been called notorious, infamous and degenerate by peers. In The
Beats: An Existential Comedy he wanders around the boardwalk. In another
film he descends the circular staircase of an oil storage tank to the
tune of "A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody." Read at On the Beach
Bookstore and other places in mid-60s. Became Warhol Superstar.

Paul Mena
On a website devote to the haiku form, this poem was found:Venice Beach
body builders
can't stop the rain

Shanna Moore
art director of the Gas House, lived in the cellar of what is now the
Morrison with Jimmy Morris and Tony Scibella, left Venice in 1961. Some
of her Venice poems are here.

James Ryan Morris
Korean war veteran. Later in Colorado, one of those responsible for newspaper
Mile High Underground

Jim Natal
co-host of the HyperPoets weekly reading series at the Rose Cafe'

David St. John
A 1994 issue of American Poetry Review published an interview conducted
by Karen Fish with St. John at his home in Venice, where he had resided
for seven years. Indeed the matter of where he lived was uppermost on
the poet's mind. When asked how he would prefer to begin, he cited the
precedents of the Paris Review and Esquire, which had both
recently featured writers talking about the places they inhabited. St.
John wanted the article about him to note that he lives
with his wife, poet Molly Bendall, and their daughter Vivienne in a 1910
Craftsman bungalow on a historic, palm-lined street in Venice, California.

He added that the fireplace mantel was made
from a piece of the original Venice Pier, recovered after the fire. Before
that, St. John had lived in an apartment near Muscle Beach in which some
members of Suicidal Tendencies and the Eagles had previously lived. It
was also near the boardwalk building that was once home to Jim Morrison,
now decorated with a large mural depicting the musician.

St. John said that to him the most amazing
thing about Venice was the mix of people.

Telepoem In the early 80s or thereabouts, this was a dial-a-poem service that
accepted works from which accepted works from local poets. It had a Venice
exchange and the Dust Directory listed its address as 230 San Juan Avenue.